Star Wars: Ahsoka sets date to blast off on Disney+
Disney’s latest trip to a galaxy far, far away stars Rosario Dawson
Aux News Disney
Disney has finally announced a release date for its next installment in the seemingly endless string of Star Wars TV shows. Star Wars: Ahsoka will land on Disney+ on August 23, giving fans the live-action Clone Wars sequel they crave. Ahsoka stars Rosario Dawson as the titular Jedi. Dawson stepped into the role during season two of The Mandalorian when she finally ruined everyone’s fun and told Mando Baby Yoda’s real name was “Grogu.” It was a dark day.
To make everyone feel better about that, Disney released a new TV spot for the series premiere, allowing us to see Dawson in action. Additionally, the trailer lets us gaze upon the flesh and blood visage of some other formerly animated characters, including Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and, of course, the return of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), who’s becoming a regular familiar face in the Star Wars universe—not bad for a character mostly known for letting us know that “many Bothans died” to make Rogue One a movie. The trailer also teases the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), a blue-faced baddie who first made his appearance in the early 90s via Star Wars books and was resurrected by George Lucas’ Padawan Dave Filoni for Star Wars: Rebels.
As hard as it is to believe, it’s been almost two months since Disney+ had a new Star Wars offering. 60 days without someone saying, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” has us reminiscing about the 15 years between Return Of The Jedi and The Phantom Menace. A chilling thought if there ever was one. And thankfully, the near-constant pain and agony of not having a Star Wars TV show on the air is about to end.
Star Wars: Ahsoka premieres on August 23 on Disney+
50 Comments
And Dave Filoni succeeds where millions of fanfic writers have failed!
But, plot twist, he succeeded at failing!
The only reason I think Mando works is Favreau balances things out. When Filoni goes solo you get the Book of Boba Buddy, the nicest bounty Hunter in Tatooine
Wait what? It’s Favreau that basically goes solo to make Book of Boba.
Filoni’s contribution is in the episode with Luke, which is arguably one of the best in Book of Boba.
Oh, I thought that was a Filoni joint. I am wrong, forgive me please
Poor Manny Bothans 🙁
Can we get a D+ show that just features Bothans being slaughtered left and right? Starting with Borsk Fey’lya.
I’d pay money to see that asshole slapped around for a while holy crap.
Hopefully we’ll get to see the relationship between Mon Mothma and Manny Bothans start to develop in Andor S2.
Little known fact: Manny Bothans was the real original leader of the Rebellion, the only reason Mon Mothma took over was because Manny got killed getting the Death Star plans 🙁
“I remember Manny. He made a killer Gornt Pie in spicy brown sauce.”
First Manny needs to escape the clutches of Darth Bernard:
Without making me watch dozens of episodes of Clone Wars, is there a reasonable explanation for why Ahsoka (who started out as Anakin’s padawan) wasn’t killed at the end of the prequels? It sure seems like we keep meeting more and more Jedis who somehow survived.
Jedis are basically space wizards and the Emperor’s plan was to have basic henchmen try to kill many of them across the galaxy. Sure there is an element of surprise there but Jedi powers include sensing that type of thing too. Is it reasonable to expect that all or even a majority of them would die from the initial Order? It’s not like he meticulously planned all their deaths like Walter White and the prison gang.But to more directly answer your question, she had just captured a resurrected Darth Maul in the Clone Wars show and sets him loose to cause a distraction when the clone troopers attack her. She uses that distraction to escape.
That and she manages to beat some sense into one of the clone troopers (Rex, I think) and, with his help, she’s able to make her escape. Then she goes into hiding for… years, basically, only popping up when she can assist the burgeoning rebel factions.
That’s right. The wonkier explanation is how she escapes Vader in Rebels. I wonder if her live-action show will explore that at all lol.
SPOILERS, I guess, but . . . it’s weird . . .. . . she gets time-travel pulled into some weird Force dimension by Ezra, where they’re then hunted by the Emperor, and then Ezra has to choose not to save Kanan because Kanan died saving the whole crew. It’s all very strange, but kinda works in-context.
Oh yea I remember how it happened – it just seems like a sort of crazy thing that the average fan of Star Wars may not be into.
They fight. It’s a draw. She escapes. Was any further explanation needed?
Frankly, the whole explanation can be summarized as “Ashoka is awesome. That’s why.”
Animated Ahsoka, yes. Live action Ahsoka, meh.
That isn’t what happens though. They fight, she loses and is about to be killed, Ezra walks into a void between space and time and rescues her last second and also brings her to present day, they narrowly escape an attack from the Emperor in that same void, and Ahsoka lives to fight another day.I guess they could retcon it but the same guy who wrote that plot in Rebels is in charge of Ahsoka so doubt they will.
In “Twilight of the Apprentice”, they fight to a draw and each walk away. Not sure what you’re talking about, but I missed some of Rebels.
You may want to rewatch the episode. They never show Ahsoka walking away – only Vader. And the Rebels final season shows how she truly escapes which is what is described above.
On one level, it’s not too ridiculous that we have 100 or so survivors of Order 66. There were 10,000 active Jedi during the Clone Wars, so the Clones missing 1% isn’t that bad.On another level, it makes Yoda and Ben look like even worse incompetent liars than they already did.
Incompetent, yes, but liars? By the time the OT rolls around, it’s possible that all or at least most of the other O66 survivors could be dead.
That said, even if there were five of them all together, including Obi Wan and Yoda, you’d think they could have come up with ANY kind of other strategy for taking down the Emperor other than, “let’s just let the Empire streamroll over the entire galaxy for 20 years while we wait for Anakin’s kid(s) to grow up.”
the ashoka character has big eyes and a high pitched voice because she was created as a stand-in for the audience of 8 year olds she was targeted at. Since she’s a character in a children’s show it would be inappropriate to kill her off.
One of the stories in the Tales of the Jedi shorts is Anakin thinking typical Jedi training techniques lack imagination, and designing a new regimen for Ahsoka. Part of it wound up being similar enough to how General Order 66 was deployed that she’d essentially had years of prep for that moment.Also, she’s awesome.
Without getting too deeply into it, Ahsoka left the Jedi order towards the end of the run of the Clone Wars, so apparently doesn’t count as a Jedi to Ben and Obi-Wan during the OT. The “Final Season” Clone Wars revival closes with Ahsoka during Order 66.
Everyone gave you the in universe reason for it but the real reason is Jedi’s are cool and Disney is super gun shy about introducing new protagonists after all the hate the new trilogy eventually got. So outside of Mando they seem to be sticking to just have more and more cartoon characters become live action. I keep hoping they actually try something radical can tell a KOTOR era story
The Acolyte is set near the end of the High Republic era..Not Old Republic, but getting warmer.
Re: Filoni’s characters, it occurs to me there may be a kind of grand irony at play here: when he was starting out, and even getting into the Rebels timeline, he was doubtless barred from doing series/stories about Luke, Leia, and Han because they were too important for mere animation. (Yes, I know that there’s a Rebels episode featuring Leia.) So instead, he worked with his characters Ahsoka and Ezra, and kept working with them… with the result being that not only do they have far more total canon screen time than Luke/Leia/Han, Ahsoka is now poised to eclipse their screen time in live action, too. As for Luke/Leia/Han, when the franchise did use them again, they did so only to discard them fairly quickly.So, we’ve got a case where the classic, “important” characters are limited to books and comics, while the “secondary” characters are starting to not only dominate the Disney+ series, but they’re heading for the big screen themselves. It’s… kinda wild.
I’m ok with this, Lucas squandered his opportunity for whatever reason (probably the toy deal) to give the world Prime Luke in those 16 years between OT and PT. We got a couple Ewok TV movies instead.
The truly wild thing about Filoni’s characters to me is that most of them are the ‘original characters’, just visually derived more from the original McQuarrie art (Zeb, Chopper, and Kanan being direct or nearly direct lifts).
Its fair to say that the OT existed decades before the age of streaming and things like film franchises were simpler things. Of course there’s more screen time now, we have more screens and channels. Its also a bad sign if the creatives can only regurgitate the main characters over and over. Imagine if SW on Disney was instead “Young Luke” or “Luke The Missing Years.” They tried it with Solo and it bombed, mainly because these characters are old and tired and played out. We know their story, finished their arcs, and want nothing more from them, and if we got more it would be terrible filler-esque nonsense.Also because they’re so tied to the actor who plays them. Most of whom no longer want to, are too aged to pass as them well anymore, or have passed away. Worse, the personas of these actors and their characters have fallen out of fashion. Luke the unfaltering moralist is seen as cheesy and boringly sanctimonious today. Leia’s girl power feminism, while still a powerful message, is common today and not the shock it was in 1977. Han’s sexy drunken gambler type also comes off as less sexy and more creepy and trashy today. Making him not murder Greedo in cold blood softened his image a bit but its just not enough. Personally, making him more violent and unpredictable would have made a better character, but Lucas disagrees.Disney does have the option to recast Luke, Leia, and Han and it would be trivial to do. They don’t. Possibly because of the failure of Solo and because fans would probably revolt.The OT universe timeline with other character is really fun and Rogue One and Andor showed how well that could work. I think Disney should focus more on shows like that for old timers wanting the classic universe. Let Luke, Leia, and Han rest. We’re done with them.
Star Wars is such a vast universe that it makes sense to show us other characters then the original big three. I’m not a huge fan of all of Filonis characters but I do like to see Star Wars without the original trilogy baggage.
I also find it wild that Ahsoka, a character I initially loathed, has become one of the most 3-dimensional Star Wars characters that she’s arguably one of the easiest to empathise with. It’s wild that if you’d had told me 15 years ago that I’d be wanting to see Star Wars: Ahsoka, I’d had told you you’re crazy.
The Bothans had nothing to do with Rogue One or A New Hope. They provide the Rebellion with the info that the Emperor will be visiting the new Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Yeah it’s a bit of supernerd pedantry but back in the good old days that’s what this place was all about.
The fact that the piece is dripping with hate-snark clued me into how interested in the setting they are.
I’m wondering who they thought said “the line” in Andor, though…
Am I a supernerd for thinking this doesn’t even rate as supernerd pedantry?
It’s like Bothans are only mentioned in ROTJ, one of the most popular films ever made. Anyone thinking Bothans are in ANH (another one of the most popular films ever made) is just being willfully ignorant.
While I wasn’t a die hard Clone Wars fan and didn’t watch the show’s entire run, to me Dawson’s portrayal of Ahsoka doesn’t remotely evoke the character from the animated series one bit.
I think she’s got the look, the voice, and portrays an older Ahsoka reasonably well.
So we have one for and one against. Talking to Star Wars fans really is a zero sum game! 😀
On this, we disagree!
So Genevieve O’Reilly plays Mon Mothma during the Clone Wars, then during the pre-OT era, then during Rogue One, then Mon Mothma morphs into Caroline Blakiston and then changes back into a O’Reilly during the post OT Mando-era?Huh?
Dude, c’mon.
Usually some of your criticisms are valid, but ROTJ was 40 years ago and Caroline Blakiston is currently 90 years old. It goes without saying if you’re making stories now either side of ROTJ in the chronology, they can’t use Caroline Blakiston no matter how much they’d like to.
it’s jarring because she looks exactly like Andor-era Mon Mothma even though the show is set, what 10-15 years later? O’Reilly is a lovely person and will undeniably continue to age gracefully, but it looks like they made zero effort to make her look any different from her “younger” self.
You’re basing that on the one, maybe two shots of her we’re seen.. as a hologram.
She wouldn’t look that much older, and you’re nit picking.
It’s kind of wild that we’ve gotten to the point where people are complaining that a 46 year old actress isn’t old enough.
Yay progress?
BTW, live action Hera looks atrocious.